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School

University of Toronto Scarborough

Department

Psychology

Course

PSYB30H3

Professor

Connie Boudens

Semester

Winter

Description

PSYB30 – Lecture 2 Purple Text – Prof’s Speech
PSYB30 – Lecture 2 Purple Text – Prof’s Speech
TraitApproach: Part I
Trait = a consistent pattern of behavior, emotion, and thought
- Not just behaviour
- each trait can be thought of as a way of relating to the environment
- explains/emphasizes the idea of stability over time and situations and distinctiveness
between people
Personality = sum of all traits
Trait theories provide descriptions for the way people behave that must be explained by other
theories
- the descriptions theories provide do not explain why people behave that way, or any
developmental aspect, and don’t explain subconscious factors – they look at things close
to the surface
Theorists try to establish:
 framework within which any and all persons can be described
 taxonomy – (classification scheme) of traits
Approaches to discovering traits
Lexical – takes words that describe traits and tries to figure out which ones are the most
common
Statistical (Empirical) – start from data collected from people, use data to try to figure out
differences between people
Theoretical – starting from theory
Common Traits and Trait Continua
• Common traits = traits shared by all, traits that everyone has more or less of
• Trait continuum – each person can be placed somewhere on the continuum
• Behaviours can be represented on trait continuum
• Scores assumed to be normal distributed - fewer people score in the extreme on any trait
• Ordering people along these dimensions is nomothetic approach used in most trait
theories
• Compares people along the same personality dimensions
• Contrast with idiographic approach
• In-depth study of individuals
GordonAllport Key Ideas
 Advocate of Idiographic approach
 Individual Uniqueness = Combination of traits
 Use of diaries, interviews, behavioural observations, q-sort etc. to assess
personality
Traits
• Internal structures that render many stimuli functionally equivalent and yield similar
adaptive and expressive behaviours.
• Apersonality trait is something inside the person that makes external stimulus seem the
same to that person
• Ex.Ashy person might see all social situations as threatening and react with
anxiety
• Traits express what a person generally does across situations, not what they’ll always do
• Inconsistency does not mean that traits doesn’t exist - situations also have
influence
• Ex. Lack of sociability at a funeral
Allport specified Three types of traits…
• Cardinal
• Asingle characteristic that directs most of a person’s activities; everything that
that person does; has a strong influence over their life
• Few people have them
• i.e. Mother Theresa – caring, sacrificed much
• Superman – helpful
• Central
• Main characteristics of an individual – how you describe someone
• Usually 5-10 central traits that a person has
• This is how people tend to describe people at this level because there is a balance
of very general and very specific;
• Ex. Extraverted vs. sociable vs. Talks a lot
• Secondary
• Affects behavior in fewer situations
• Less central
• Doesn’t have that much impact on the person’s behavior
• Easier to change
• Easier to modify
• Ex. Preference of dark chocolate, preference of rap music
Raymond Cattell
 One of the founding individuals of trait psychology
 Empirical approach to trait theory
 Started off with some lexical work that Gordon Allport had done
• Allport had gone through a dictionary and looked for words related to
traits (his lexical contribution)
• There was a list of 4500 trait words that Allport developed • And Catell used those to develop a taxonomy of 16 personality factors
 Reduction of 4,500 trait words (left byAllport) to 16 most basic personality dimensions
 Catell removed the synonyms
 Collected ratings on the remaining traits
 Used factor analysis to reduce the amount of traits that he had
Catell had three Major Divisions of Traits
• Constitutional (biological) vs. environment-mold (learned)
• Biological based – either genetic or in some way part of the fact that we are
human
• Ability vs. temperament vs. dynamic
• Surface vs. source vs. second-order
Ability vs. temperament vs. dynamic traits
Ability
• Basically concern the ability to deal with complexity
• More or less equivalent to intelligence (or very similar)
• Skill in dealing with complexity
• = intelligence
• Catell described two types of intelligence
• Fluid
• Ability to think and reason
• Not learned
• Might to some extent learn better techniques to think and reason
• But Catell said that it was innate, not learned
• Crys•allStuff that you learn
• Memory, facts
Temperament
• General traits that appear early
• Used in the same way as developmental psychologists
• Usually with infants, temperament falls into 3 categories: easy, difficult or slow to
warm up
• Catell used the idea of temperament traits to describe something that appears very
early in someone’s development when that person is still an infant
• their daily cycles are, moodiness, interest in othersare, and how regular
Dynamic traits
• Motivations
• Ambition, competitiveness, etc.
• Things that drive you or prevent you from making progress in certain
areas are dynamic traits
Surface vs. Source Traits
• Where Catell’s data reduction comes into play • Surface traits: superficial
• Not superficial meaning meaningless, superficial meaning on the surface of
things, things that are more accessible
• Source traits: deeper, more comprehensive
• The traits that Catell identified through factor analysis
• Intelligence may be thought of as a source trait and the surface traits associated
with this source trait would be how quickly they learn rules and apply them to
different contexts, etc.
FactorAnalysis
• Statistical technique
• Summarizes how a large number of variables are related to each other
Summarizes how a large # of variables are related
• Many different measures administered to many respondents
• Some scores will be positively correlated; others negatively correlated
• If there is a high correlation between things, there may be an underlying factor
that connects those two things; suggests that the two things have something in
common; Correlations might reflect t